Jonah Lounds Humanities
Clothing for a Crocodile: the Humanization of Nature in Post-Stalinist Children’s Medias
This summer, Jonah will be exploring the available digital archives of the Russian National Library, US Library of Congress, Princeton’s Cotsen Children’s Library, and the Gosfilmofond in Moscow, in order to compile and analyze a vast collection of Soviet children’s books, films, and animations produced in the 1960s and ‘70s which display the trope of the personified and humanized animal. Lounds’ research is intended to illuminate any new cultural meanings produced by the common use of a trope that is so irreconcilable with traditional Marxist assertions of human exceptionalism and supremacy over the natural world. Such findings should offer an alternative to the common assumption that, with the waning political relevance of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR’s twilight years, the Soviet Union had become completely devoid of vision and thought.
